Anti-Defamation League offices raided by police Spy data sought in San Francisco

April 09, 1993|By San Francisco Chronicle

SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco police have raided the offices of the Anti-Defamation League, looking for illegally obtained law enforcement information used in a nationwide political spy operation.

The district attorney's office yesterday also released hundreds of pages of documents detailing how ADL operatives infiltrated political groups.

The documents describe a widespread spy operation aimed at such diverse organizations as the white supremacist White Aryan Resistance, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, Operation Rescue, Greenpeace, the NAACP, the board of directors of public television station KQED and the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper.

The searches of the ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles were the latest twist in a scandal that erupted in the San Francisco Police Department in November after Tom Gerard, a former inspector in the now-defunct police intelligence unit, was questioned by the FBI about whether he had illegally sold intelligence files to the South African government.

An affidavit by police Inspector Ron Roth said the searches were necessary because ADL officials did not turn over files as they had promised in December.

Jerrold Ladar, an attorney representing the ADL, said the organization has cooperated in the investigation. He did not elaborate.

But Inspector Roth said: "ADL employees were less than truthful with regards to the employment of Roy Bullock and other matters."

Investigators believe that Mr. Bullock, a San Francisco art dealer, and Mr. Gerard, who has since fled to the Philippines, collaborated in developing a vast computer database with 9,876 files on politically active people, including driver's license numbers, physical description and criminal records, according to Inspector Roth's affidavit.

The investigators say that Mr. Bullock was for nearly 40 years a full-time spymaster for the ADL and that most of his database was used by the Jewish group, which is dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism.